The Netflix series 13 Reasons Why. The death of Project Semicolon founder Amy Bluel. The study that discovered that a group of white, middle-aged Americans are dying what they call "deaths of despair."

What do these three things have in common?

Let's call it an absence of hope.

In troubling times, it's easy to put your finger on everything that's going wrong. And we're given the idea that focusing on the problems is somehow the right thing, the mature thing to do, while focusing on the good makes you naive or foolish.